


modern rituals

by hungryghosts



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-16
Updated: 2011-11-16
Packaged: 2017-10-26 04:06:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/278505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hungryghosts/pseuds/hungryghosts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The house feels different than Mal remembers, a space that is both too big and too small. A paradox, if you will.</p>
            </blockquote>





	modern rituals

**Author's Note:**

> originally written for a prompt on the inception kink meme more than a year ago, heh

When they come back from dreaming, everything else follows. Not for her, though. The house feels different than Mal remembers, a space that is both too big and too small. A paradox, if you will. She fingers the top, slight in her hands, before twisting it between her thumb and forefinger. It spins and spins and spins, smooth as it cuts across the surface of the table, two real, solid objects pressed on top of each other, but there is a moment as it spins, right there -

James knocks into the leg of the table and the top falls to the ground.

This is what is real, Mal tells herself as she picks it back up again (was it always this cold and sharp against her palm? is she remembering it wrong?) and places it in her pocket. This is what is real.

But there was a moment.

-

Dinner conversations fall flat.

"Remember when--" Mal cuts off the question before she has a chance to finish it, thinking of a long ago day in an abandoned amusement park, cotton candy sticking between their fingers. But there was no candy, no amusement park, not in any place other than the spaces of her mind and his. Maybe they count as memories, but she won't bring them up - not here. She needs to focus on what is real: the pink in Phillipa's dress, the mess James is making as Dom tries to feed him, the table beneath her elbows.

Later that night, she brushes her hands through Dom's hair. There is no glint of grey, she reminds herself, only a trick that unreal memories and flickering lights are playing on her.

-

Mal dreams of a different reality. One where the sound of her children's laughter won't bite at her skin. She doesn't bake a cake for Phillipa's birthday, and she tells Dom she simply forgot. He is concerned, stroking her hair and kissing her forehead as if he knows what is wrong with her.

He finds her top and spins it on the table next to their bed. She feels dizzy as she watches it, turning her head away before she can see whether it topples. "It fell," he says to her, when she flinches and refuses to look. No, no, no, he didn't hold it right, he spun it wrong, he can't be sure. Mal wants to take it from him and test it for herself - but there was a moment before and she doesn't need to face it again.

"Okay," Mal sighs.

This time, she locks her top away in a place where Dom cannot find it.

-

At Mal's insistence, they start exploring dreams again. Because Dom is hesitant (because Dom is a coward, she thinks bitterly, resentfully, and how did she come to resent her own husband?) they never push as deep as they did before. She is always the one who designs the layers now, and she crafts the mazes as intricately as possible, winding twists around crevices that give her plenty of space to hide inside Dom's mind. Neither of them want to enter her dreams anymore, and that is fine. Somewhere in there exists a truth he won't acknowledge and Mal will simply create more hidden corners for herself until he does.

("I don't want to get lost again," he says into the palm of her hand, when he really means _I don't want to lose you_.

Mal bites her lip to keep from laughing. Dom, sweetheart, she is not the one who is lost.)

Dreams are the only place she can stand him touching her body, and he does so almost desperately. Mal tries, once, out there--whatever and wherever _there_ is, she refuses to call it reality--hooking one leg around Dom and pressing herself onto him. She growls into his ear and shakes when she comes, but none of it makes her feel real. After he goes to sleep, Mal traces his eyebrows with her fingers, outlining the wrinkles on his face. He looks older.

"You are not real," she whispers. Dom's brow furrows.

-

Nothing changes, and here is the problem. Here is a world that is perfect and small and the same; Mal's not sure why she is the only one who can see outside of it.

"We are already in reality, Mal," he snaps angrily. "This reality."

"Repeating it over and over won't make it true." She knows. She already tried.

-

Now, her favorite parts of the dreams are the deaths. Mal never waits for the time to run out, merely grabs the knife (there is always a knife with her, cool and piercing) and plunges it into Dom's stomach, hears him softly cry out, and feels, rather than sees, the blood stain his clothes. And then he is gone. After that comes the inevitable moment of panic - maybe this time it is real, maybe this time they will actually die, maybe this time, but she kills herself before she gives in.

It is not good enough, Mal considers absentmindedly, once she has woken up. She would prefer for them to die together.

That can always be arranged. This is simply practice, after all.

-

"Do you love me?"

Dom pulls his fingers through hers and kisses the back of her hand. Mal doesn't feel his lips on her skin. "Always."

She knows what she has to do.


End file.
